New York liquor licence classes
Why the SLA register is the best-structured alcohol dataset in the country.
New York’s State Liquor Authority publishes the cleanest alcohol dataset we found anywhere: 60,005 active licences, refreshed daily, and 98% of them carry coordinates.
What the classes look like
Unlike Texas, New York publishes a plain-English description on every record, so no decoding is needed. The distribution is dominated by a handful of classes:
- Restaurant — about 17,000, the largest single class
- Grocery Store — about 14,900, mostly beer and cider
- Food & Beverage Business — about 6,800
- Additional Bar — about 4,100, a second service point at an existing licensed premises
- Liquor Store — about 3,400
- Direct Shipper Wine, Club, Drug Store, Hotel, Catering Establishment and a long tail
Three registers, not one
The SLA publishes active, pending and inactive licences as separate datasets. A pending application is a genuine signal — it means someone is trying to open.
The 200-foot and 500-foot rules
Two location rules shape where a New York licence can exist at all. The 200-foot rule bars a full liquor licence within 200 feet of a school or place of worship. The 500-foot rule requires a public-interest hearing where three or more on-premises licences already sit within 500 feet. This is why licence density in parts of New York City plateaus, and why an existing licence at an address can be worth a great deal.
Why geocoding matters
Because the SLA publishes coordinates, we can answer “what else is licensed within a mile of here” with a live spatial query rather than a postcode approximation. New York licence pages get a real proximity list. Texas has no coordinate column, so there we fall back to matching postcode — and we say so on the page.